Vermont

How Things Grow

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Early this spring, I planted a rosebush beside the back door, in some attempt to transform a little bit of our cedar-shingled house into a Red Rose imbued cottage. Gardening brilliance was wholly lacking. The rose bush has thrived, blossoming profusely, and yet again. In this poor Vermont soil–out of stone and sand and clay–deep glossy green emerges, rose hips fatten, tender petals perfume the air. In and out I go, sometimes all day, and this fragrance rises up to greet me.

He sendeth sun, he sendeth shower,
Alike they’re needful for the flower:
And joys and tears alike are sent
To give the soul fit nourishment.

–– Sarah Flower Adams

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Parenting a Teen and Writing a Novel

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My long-time friend and I went canoeing and swimming with our kids today. The ten-year-old girls immediately ran for the beach, swam the entire time, and never put one toe in the canoe. The two teenagers, a him and her, swung the heavy canoe off the car and confidently carried it to the lake. How the heck did this happen? These two kids I once held on my lap while they shared goldfish crackers? After a dutiful swim, they preferred to sit on the beach–forget romping in the water–and talk.

There’s a fiction phrase–a willing suspension of disbelief–which, the further along in parenting, the more that seems a truism for life. I expect to be in the teen years for a good long while yet, and I could say it’s interesting, but, in fact, it’s darn mesmerizing… among a few other adjectives, too. But when these teens were ten-years-old themselves, I could never have believed they would become so full as people, so funny, so wry, and with legs sprawled everywhere. Here I am, I thought, in that perpetual rough draft of my life, garnering more material.

What you are aiming for (in writing a novel) is willing suspension of disbelief, and the first person who must suspend disbelief is yourself. Some beginning novelists have more disbelief than others, but even if your burden of disbelief is heavy, the only way to suspend it is to keep adding sentences to the ones you have already written.

–– Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel
…. Or, I take this to mean, in other words, keep on trekking:  parenting and writing.

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How Things Spiral: the Crabby Woman’s Garden Entry

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Today: by late afternoon, a day of complete frustration. Early at my laptop, I rewrote pages that made no sense, spelled specify wrong, sent an angry email to an innocent person I had to balefully retract, became enraged over a request from a friend I could never fulfill, filled out paperwork that marked a new low in the bureaucratic world for me, screwed up so badly at work I wept….. and that’s merely scratching the surface of this day.

To salvage, I went running before dinner while my daughter biked, and we met up with a neighbor who was strollering her two little kids. I’m very crabby, she immediately told me. Hey, me, too.

Later, we walked through my garden, and she cut handfuls of lemon balm and sage and mint, basil, and a fistful of hydrangeas. Her little boy ate sun golds. My garden, which has withered and died in entire beds this season, rampaged wildly in others, so neglected I’ve despaired–my garden. Yet, snipping these great handfuls for her, a cacophony of sweet scents wafted around us, and I realized what strange and unexpected beauty rose from my patch of earth this year.

After dinner, my daughter biked to her friend’s for trampoline jumping, and his mother phoned and apologized for sending my child home late. They kept laughing, she said. I had just walked into the kitchen with my dusty feet and my skirt full of tomatoes and peppers. One by one, I laid these fruits on the table. Fine, I said. Let them laugh.

This tiny seed
do not belittle:
red pepper.

–– Basho

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Elmore Mountain/Photo by Molly S.

Oh, Mary Oliver…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

How sweet can this job be? When I arrived at the Galaxy Bookshop today, my co-worker handed me an advance reading copy and said, This is the important thing for today. You need to read this.

Felicity by Mary Oliver.

My fellow bookseller said, Some of these poems she’s created just for me.

And then she promptly showed me a poem I knew was written solely for me. But maybe you, too?

NO, I’VE NEVER BEEN TO THIS COUNTRY

No I’d never been to this country
before. No, I didn’t know where the roads
would lead me. No, I didn’t intend to
turn back.

–– Mary Oliver

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

Summer

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My younger daughter told me today, It will be bad for me in a few years.

Why’s that? I assumed she was pre-mourning her older sister’s forthcoming passage into adulthood and that ached-for leap into adult life.

My child said, Because my aunt buys my really nice pajamas at a place where she buys her boys’ pajamas, and we love these pajamas, and the sizes don’t go above 12.

My child will never remember this conversation. Two years hence I could bring up this remark around the woodstove, and I bet cash now she likely won’t remember this. But today, here, this meant something to her. A summertime world of utter happiness, a way of living this season where she and her two beloved cousins sleep in a small room, reading and giggling, all in their same beloved pajamas. These are days filled with bikes, swimming, endless meals –  also of ears primed to hear, trying to piece out the puzzle of adult lives, the constant threads of conversation and emotion. Mainly, though, these children seek space for their growth and energy. Tonight, this child wanted to go walking in the gloaming. We went out, all of us, walking along the gravel road, and didn’t cross back into the house until long past dark.

Here’s Dylan Thomas on childhood in a stanza of “Fern Hill”:

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was
air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the
nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

Eyes

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My dear daughters sometimes  look at the books I’m reading and moan, How can you read that? My Struggle? Come on, mom…..

I read on, I read on. In this cool and rainy Vermont July, my nephew and daughter picked wild raspberries this evening, while the clouds darkened ominously and the wind stirred up, and I bolstered my fence against the woodchuck. As a child, summer days wound out into a sheer infinity, but now it seems perhaps tomorrow the children will be back at school and I’ll be stepping into my boots to carry in another armload of wood. Tomorrow seems tucked into today, the years interlaced like a pair of folded hands.

In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes

the hand that waved once
in my father’s eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:

and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.

–– Galway Kinnell

Yasuhiro

Yasuhiro